As cyber-crime increases in speed and sophistication, big data analytic tools will become crucial when it comes to enterprise security, says RSA. The security company believes that intelligence-driven security is just the tip of the iceberg; businesses and organisations need to be smarter with better data science in order to deal with threats.

Daniel Cohen, Head of Knowledge Delivery and Business Development at RSA, adds: “It’s not ‘if’ we are going to be breached, so there is a need to focus more on detection. We saw with the Target breach it was the human factor that slipped there, so we have to be able to bring in more automation.”

However the adoption of big data analytics for security within businesses is still in early development, although banks are leading the way in deploying fraud prevention analytics and have begun to work with big data start-ups for their security services. A recent Gartner study highlighted that only 8% of large enterprises have adopted big data analytics, but is likely to grow to around 25% by 2016.

Cohen continued: “We are still at the stage where we are collecting huge amounts of data, and we need to improve the mining of that data. Big data can improve the analyst’s ability to deal with the more human intelligence tasks, and not have to do a lot of the optimisation and statistical work that machines can do. The ‘cat and mouse’ game we are playing is going to call for better data science, and so we have to be able to detect these anomalies much faster, and that means better use of big data.”